Sun, Sea, and Supercomputers

Another November, another Supercomputing conference (SC'06). This year we were in Tampa, Florida, a nice change from grey and rainy Southampton. It certainly was hot, in the 80s Fahrenheit, but the thunderstorms are pretty torrential too!

We were honoured to be part of the huge Microsoft stand again, which is very exciting as Windows Compute Cluster Server is now a real product. Two of our videos were running on the big Plasma screen in between booth talks. The folks opposite on the Pacific Nortwest Labs stand now know more than they ever wanted to about our BAE Systems CFD project, and the Smallpeice Trust 'Computers in Engineering' course we ran in July!

This year our demo was pretty cool, pushing the .NET 3 Framework, using Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, and Globus 2 accessing Windows Compute Cluster. We were performing whole Earth System simulations (atmosphere + ocean) to investigate scenarios of the Gulf Stream switching on and off. Running all of this from inside a web browser, with WPF, was one of the first times anyone had seen such Web 2.0 technology being used in anger - even the Microsoft folks ;)

Well, November 9th was an interesting day... A quick trip to Brussels to the Microsoft Executive Briefing Centre for the Microsoft Research EU Innovation Day 2006. These have been running for a few years now, and it is an opportunity for Microsoft to show off all of the funky research they are doing in Europe and around the world!

This year we were invited to showcase the work we're doing in the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing (www.mihpc.net).

There were lots of people rushing around, as not only was Bill Gates coming to give a keynote speech, but so was the EU President, Matti Vanhanen. Their speeches were very interesting, discussing why innovation in Europe is not as fruitful as in other regions, and what can be done to help.

If you want to see how Windows Workflow Foundation can be used for technical computing, then you can read the Southampton Institute's paper entitled 'Leveraging Windows Workflow Foundation for Scientific Workflows in Wind Tunnel Applications' here...